I've just been asked to advise management on organisational
quality issues. There seems general agreement that the test
labour content across most development projects is around 50%
(when people do honest accounting). The central organisational
issue, then, is who does that 50% and how do we manage it?
Management are especially eager to learn good
answers to the following questions:
- What is the best tester to developer ratio?
- Who should QA report to?
- How skilled should "testers" be? And how do you hire them, keep them, and motivate them?
As detailed in the References section below, I've done a first
cut at googling for resources that might help me answer
these questions. If you know of other good resources, please
let us know.
Here's what we currently do:
- We have roughly one tester per ten developers.
- QA is part of and reports to Development. Most development project teams have a QA resource from day one in the project.
- Most of our "testers" have decent programming skills: they ensure requirements and designs are testable, design test strategies, write test plans, write test automation harnesses, and so on.
How do you do it?
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|